OpenAI CEO raises $115M for crypto company that scans people’s eyeballs | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI CEO raises $115M for crypto company that scans people’s eyeballs

arstechnica.com

42 pointsmkolassa52 comments

What I find even more dystopian is that there's already a black market for those digital eyeball credentials:

> Meanwhile, a black market emerged on Chinese social media and ecommerce sites. Sellers were offering KYC verifications for the World App, which offers wallet and ID services. The credentials often come from developing countries like Cambodia and Kenya, according to social media posts. [1]

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/05/24/black-market-for-...

Just a reminder that biometric data (like iris or fingerprint scans) are "usernames", not passwords. If a site's password database is leaked, you can change your password. If a site's iris scan database is leaked, you're out of luck.

I think eventually we’ll have to move to a model where the government issues you private keys via a notary-like biometric verification process. Even if someone steals your biometrics, they can’t fake them to an in-person notary. Rotate your keys by visiting another notary.

I'm sure a16z invested in them. I don't even need to check.

Why, that's not a dystopian hellscape at all! /s

I actually think it’s better than the current situation where the state can freeze your ability to transact at any time.

Only cash avoids an intermediary that can lock you out.

I hope this dystopian surveillance project cum get-rich-quick crypto scheme fails woefully. Tools for Humanity my a*…Wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The OP quotes one of the investors:

"Worldcoin has a unique opportunity to establish and scale a new privacy-preserving primitive for the Internet...", etc.

I'm not going to quote the rest because everyone here is tired of corporate-speak.

Translation from corporate-speak:

"We're high as a kite on the vision of managing identification credentials for everyone everywhere."

---

PS. Let me add: I believe Sam and his team genuinely have good intentions. But good intentions do not guarantee a good outcome.

Looks like he’s dumping his bags on some gullible investors. Even Sam Altman has a shitcoin

What I don't understand about this at all, and it's alluded to in the article mentioning black market orbs, how can some decentralized system with Iris scans prevent fraud?

Can't someone just get their hands on one of these orbs and start uploading fake unique ids to their network? Surely it can't be impossible to generate a fake iris scan.

The only way to make sure nobody is abusing this would be to have trusted employees verify you're a real person, in which case why don't just start a non-profit in Switzerland or wherever that just runs a database of scans, what do you need this coin for?

What is there to discourage desperate or ill-informed (or both) people from selling their World ID credentials to bad actors?

Got an answer to this question here: https://twitter.com/sproule_/status/1661836717970563088

> One reason is that they can’t credible commit to the fact that they won’t also sell it to someone else (can’t prove that you deleted ur local key) or nullify the world ID by re-scanning.

There are only 8 billion people on earth, so even if every single account were fake that's still a huge improvement over the status quo where someone can spin up 8 billion fake accounts in an hour.

Where in hell can you create 8 billion accounts on any service in an hour!?

Create a problem with one company you found, then create a solution with another company you found.

What a nightmare this Sam Altman dude is

It's kinda brilliant to both build the problem and the solution

Crypto will always be a solution in search of a problem.

Crypto will always be a problem that can only be fixed with more crypto.

In the past 24 hours, close to 1 trillion dollars worth of payments have been settled on blockchains.

They eschew the need for intermediaries, like the numerous banks that recently imploded and locked depositors' funds away for who knows how long.

They eschew credit risk. Creditors cannot take your funds on an L1, even if they maliciously try.

Yea that’s fair but look what happened to BTC when BRC-20 was implemented. Similar problem on ETH L1 chain, the txn fee is very high. Imagine if Visa had those fees, no business in their right mind would use them

There are chains that don't have such fees.

Also, a wire transfer fee on a million bucks is like $20-$40. That's pretty comparable to ETH and BTC fees.

Sam’s strategy here is to create the sickness (ai) and sell the cure (worldcoin).

This is a complete grifting double hedging scam.

I can imagine this being true, but I think supervillain schemes like this don't actually work in real life. Both will just up becoming irrelevant, and the public internet will get a little shittier

Remember when these guys were the young upstarts, disrupting big business and scoring points for the little guy?

How bravely they have transitioned into collecting our eyeball scans and courageously hoarding billions of dollars while the planet withers away. Technology has changed the world.

This is one of the most blatant MLM token projects. Inviting new marks and getting benefits from the number of people you've brought into the scam, conferences, targeting of the vulnerable populations, all the hallmarks of a typical pyramid scheme.

As of 2021, there were going to be only 10 billion coins, 1 for each human and 2 billion for the founders and investors. Nothing shady or profiteering there. [https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/21/worldcoin-now-v...].

We should read how they plan to increase the supply only for births and retire coins for deaths. And if you don't have a clear cornea, no goodies for you.

Meanwhile, from the article:

> Blania told CoinDesk that Worldcoin has partnered with a “very big international manufacturer” with a plant in Germany, which will pump out about 50,000 Orbs per year. Though Blania declined to name the company or say where the company was from, when CoinDesk asked if the manufacturer was Chinese, Blania responded: “Definitely not, for many reasons, and one of them is actually security. The Orb itself has private keys and signs every message it sends so we know it’s actually a real Orb. And that means we need to lock this whole supply chain totally up so we know it’s not compromised,” Blania said.

And how do you know that I didn't claim this is a real Orb, and just steal your retina print?

Sam Altman more and more seems like a potential Bond villain.

technologies setting the stage for the mark of the beast

Well, about half of the Bond villains were insane libertarians so this check out :)

This future was foretold in 1993: [https://youtu.be/XoGkp7PPEfI]

I have to imagine that movie night at Stanford CS consists of Demolition Man, Judge Dredd and Robocop, followed by a hackathon where they try to build imitations of what they saw.

There's a good lecture on AI ethics.

It's good to have screenwriters on staff to flesh out consequences of your decisions. Plus maybe a Wall Street trader or two to figure out all the ways to game the system.

I guess if you don't have any real ideas, you scan other people's retinas ("World"-Coin), appropriate other people's creations ("Open"-AI), insert yourself in the process and sell everything back to them.

In the end, you will have created nothing of value. A single Renoir painting is worth more than all this nonsense.

I wonder how the world worked in the 1990s without such luminaries. The answer is: better!

This kind of headline would normally be torn apart by HN for being somewhat uncharitable for its word choice. But in this case, I'm sure the crypto angle will inspire a knee-jerk negative reaction.

Instead, here are a few links for the curious, which explain how the techniques Worldcoin employs may be one of the only viable methods to generate a totally privacy-preserving form of internet native identification and Sybil resistance.

The result is that no images of irises ever need to be saved, unlike CLEAR or other surveillance state friendly techniques that create dangerous repositories of private information.

1. Humanness in the Age of AI: https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...

This piece explains other techniques to identify personhood and why they've fallen short.

2. Proof of Personhood and Why It's Needed: https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/proof-of-personhood-wha...

And outline of the general motivation.

3. Privacy at Worldcoin: https://worldcoin.org/blog/developers/privacy-deep-dive

Some of the extreme lengths they've gone to make it impossible to reconstruct who is behind the unique identifier.

I can't stress how much I'm not going to scan my eyeballs for magic beans that live in my computer. I suspect I'm not alone in this.

You're not, which is why they've had to set up shop in the poorest countries in the world to recruit willing guinea pigs.

Then you will likely end up with your eyes being scanned by a state and profit-seeking corporations — along with your private data. We need methods to identify who is a real person in the internet of the future, and it should be privacy-preserving and independent of the state.

My dude, whether Sam Altman does it or not has zero bearing on that. If you care about privacy and avoiding such a dystopian outcome, vote for common-sense regulations.

How many times has “just go vote” prevented things you didn’t want

This is the fallacy of counting the set of things that don't happen (I don't know if there's a technical term for it). The rivers aren't on fire anymore, the air is clean, the skies are safe - things are just about as good as they've ever been (despite a few outliers). That's all thanks to voting and common-sense regulations.

So to answer your question directly, "pretty much constantly but it's easy to miss since by definition they're successfully being prevented."

In a democracy we're not subjugated to the state, the state is subjugated to us. Sure, they can trick people into licking their boots but the power is with the people. You can't rule over the dead and you can't rule without a head.

Have you been away for the past three years?

If someone's going to force me to do this to use whatever computer service, maybe it's time to throw the computer away, and go live in the woods. Like GP, I'm not willingly going to give that data up to any company or state actor.

Or not have your eyes scanned at all with government regulations.

I'm not going to tear it apart. They have done a good job doing it themselves:

"Worldcoin is not a dystopian nightmare."

Only in SV would someone pay $115M for new tech only to have to defend it with statements like this.

Next week on the A16z blog: "Adam Neumann is not a fraud"

methods to generate a totally privacy-preserving form of internet native identification and Sybil resistance

I thought Stefan Brands solved this over 20 years ago without scanning people's eyes.

Stefan Brands, Frédéric Légaré: Digital Identity Management based on Digital Credentials. GI Jahrestagung 2002: 120-126

is that a good place to start?

I don't know. I have his book (which regrettably I have not actually opened).

The headline doesn't seem uncharitable to me - it's literally true and phrased neutrally. What would an acceptable headline look like to you, short of regurgitating the company's own press release wording?

Please stop trying to justify a dystopian ponzi scheme.

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